Why This Is Useful
You want your Lightning Web Component to know who’s looking at it. Maybe you’re greeting them by name, maybe you’re showing their own records, maybe you’re checking something about them before rendering.
You’d think that needs an Apex controller. It doesn’t. It’s one import.
The Code
import { LightningElement } from 'lwc';
import USER_ID from '@salesforce/user/Id';
export default class QuickTipLwc extends LightningElement {
userId = USER_ID;
}And in your template:
<template>
<p>The running user Id is {userId}</p>
</template>That’s it. Drop it on a Lightning record page and there’s the Id.
No Apex controller, no wire adapter, no server round trip. Salesforce injects the value at build time.
Now Go Get The Rest Of Their Details
An Id on its own isn’t much use. Pair it with getRecord from the UI Record API and you can pull whatever you need about that user, still without writing a line of Apex:
import { LightningElement, wire } from 'lwc';
import { getRecord, getFieldValue } from 'lightning/uiRecordApi';
import USER_ID from '@salesforce/user/Id';
import NAME_FIELD from '@salesforce/schema/User.Name';
import EMAIL_FIELD from '@salesforce/schema/User.Email';
export default class GreetTheUser extends LightningElement {
@wire(getRecord, { recordId: USER_ID, fields: [NAME_FIELD, EMAIL_FIELD] })
user;
get name() { return getFieldValue(this.user.data, NAME_FIELD); }
get email() { return getFieldValue(this.user.data, EMAIL_FIELD); }
}Now you can greet them properly: “Hey Matt, how’s it going?”
The nice part is that Lightning Data Service caches this and respects field level security automatically. Your user can only see fields they’re allowed to see, and you didn’t have to write a single permission check.
Related Imports Worth Knowing
import USER_ID from '@salesforce/user/Id';
import IS_GUEST from '@salesforce/user/isGuest';
import hasPermission from '@salesforce/userPermission/ViewAllData';
import hasCustomPerm from '@salesforce/customPermission/My_Custom_Permission';isGuest is genuinely handy if your component runs in an Experience Cloud site and needs to behave differently for logged out visitors.
The custom permission import is the tidy way to gate functionality without querying anything. Full list is in the LWC modules documentation.
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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend
Advanced Apex Programming
Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture
Mastering Salesforce DevOps
Good Non-SF Specific Development Books:
Clean Code
Clean Architecture
